No arm of government should take more than a tenth.

The engine

• Abolishes the federal income, corporate, payroll, capital gains, and estate taxes. Workers keep 100% of federal withholding.
• Replaces them with a single annual levy capped at 10%, reduced by marriage and children, with a floor that cannot be legislated away.
• Restricts the federal government to that one tax. A rate ceiling means nothing if a second tax can be invented beside it, which is how the present code grew.
• Devolves all welfare (Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP) to the states, which choose whether to fund anything at all. Non-negotiable: the plan does not balance without it.
• No eligible retiree's Social Security check is cut. Everyone 62 or older at enactment keeps the full promised benefit in nominal terms. Those 55 to 61 receive buyout value and private accounts in place of a lifetime guarantee.
• Every current beneficiary re-registers with proof of citizenship within 180 days, with payments continuing while the window is open. This is the retiree's side of the bargain: the country guarantees his check will not be cut, and he proves he is the citizen it was promised to, so that every dollar owed through the transition reaches an American rather than a fraudster. Nobody currently knows how many noncitizens collect: SSA publishes no breakdown, and the Congressional Research Service offers no estimate. Re-registration produces the number and catches deceased payees, unreported marriages, identity fraud, and fraudulent dependents, against $72B in improper payments from FY2015 to FY2022. Lawfully present noncitizens who paid in receive a refund of their contributions rather than a lifetime annuity. The recovery is single-digit billions a year; the point is integrity and a verified baseline.
• Mirrors the structure at state level, capped at 10%. States drop income tax, keep property and sales. Maximum owed to all government: 20% of income — a ceiling for residents of mirroring states, since nothing compels a state to adopt the levy. What is guaranteed nationwide is the federal half.
• Exempts retirement accounts entirely (one $20,000 annual cap, no Roth/traditional distinction), inheritance below the $500M dynasty line (every family farm and family business passes untaxed; only dynasties pay), and the primary residence below $1B.
• Everyone under U.S. jurisdiction pays, citizen or not. Lawful permanent residents, visa holders, and foreign nationals with U.S.-source income are all in the base. Citizenship determines what a person receives, not what he owes — paying in is a condition of presence, drawing out is a condition of membership.
• Trusts, partnerships, and foundations are attributed to whoever controls or benefits from them. Irrevocable structures are not an exit, multi-layer and offshore chains collapse to the natural person at the end, and a foundation the filer controls is his rather than a donee.
• Eliminates non-core departments — Education, HUD, EPA, foreign aid, Commerce, Labor, Energy, and Agriculture outside its food security functions. Defense, debt service, currency, infrastructure, the VA, and a ~10% IRS remain.
• Net worth is measured monthly and averaged, not snapshotted on a single date, so assets cannot be moved offshore around the measurement and back afterward.
• Territories and tribal nations keep their existing arrangements. They do not pay the levy and do not receive the dividend; either may elect into both by compact, reversible and never imposed.
• Nuclear fission and fusion are retained and expanded as national security functions, protected from the flat-spending regime alongside defense. Compact reactors and fuel-cycle sovereignty are industrial-base and strategic assets, not discretionary research.
• Exit levy on bad-faith renunciation. Renouncing citizenship to escape the tithe triggers a mark-to-market levy at exit and denial of treaty benefits thereafter; 50% in Phase 2. The 10% ceiling is the price of membership, not a universal rate limit.

Family formation

• Marriage and children bring a household to the floor. Marriage is −5 points, each child up to four another −1, landing a family at the tiered floor of 5% during the Social Security transition and 2.5% after. The floor is a hard minimum — no combination of deductions, buy-down, or charitable giving goes beneath it. A family is not exempted from the tithe; it is brought to the least of it. These deductions are available to every citizen without regard to how long his family has been here.
• Only two things reach 0%. One hundred percent disabled veterans, who were irreparably harmed in the nation's service and have already paid in a currency the Treasury cannot return; and true farmers, whose primary livelihood is the land, because a nation that cannot feed itself is not sovereign regardless of its ledgers. Nothing else reaches zero, by design.
• $50,000 in mortgage principal forgiven per child, plus a $15,000 first-child bonus. Package cost ≈$111B/yr.
• Direct transfers carry a stricter test than rate deductions. Mortgage forgiveness requires lawful lineage at each relevant birth plus conduct-based assimilation, and in Phase 2 three generations of U.S. births under a one-way ratchet. What the government takes less of belongs to every citizen equally; what it hands over is for families who have been here and contributed across generations.
• Charitable giving earns a rate point at 0.05% of net worth, scaled so a flat dollar figure cannot buy a reduction. No self-dealing to a controlled foundation.

Food security

• Agriculture is not abolished. Its food security functions stay federal, protected alongside defense and fission: animal and plant disease control (APHIS), meat inspection (FSIS), export certification, agricultural statistics (NASS), and crop insurance reinsurance. Nutrition, conservation, and rural development devolve. About $12B/yr.
• Farmer self-insurance accounts. Exempt from the levy and separate from the $20,000 retirement cap, capped at a multiple of the farm's annual operating costs. A full account lets a farmer opt out of federal crop insurance, and lenders must accept it in place of insurance for operating loans. A bridge program covers the first five to ten years and phases out automatically. Canada has run a similar program since 2008.
• Retaliation buffer. 5% of tariff revenue, about $28B/yr, is earmarked for producers hit by retaliatory tariffs, so the tariffs fund their own fallout. The buffer is capped, with overflow going to debt principal. It is diverted from the general fund, which the arithmetic below reflects.
• Food-supply emergency, a bounded tier. It is triggered by a measured fall in national staple production below its five-year average, not by a declaration. It draws only on the retaliation buffer, can never reactivate the Nickel Transactional Surcharge or breach the spending rules, and is audit-certified and jury-terminable. The existential standard is unchanged.

Census and crime statistics

• Government counts citizens. Representation, funding formulas, and program allocation are based on the citizen count. Total population is still enumerated and published separately for planning purposes.
• Phase 1 moves the money; Phase 2 moves the seats. Funding formulas shift to citizen counts by statute. Apportionment requires the amendment, since Article I and the Fourteenth Amendment both specify “the whole number of persons.”

Crime statistics

• Three purposes: accurate measurement, effective decisions (you cannot make good decisions about crime without accurate data about crime), and restoring trust in institutions that a large share of the country no longer believes. Accurate data is as capable of dismantling a stereotype as confirming one; nothing here depends on the numbers coming out any particular way. Where data does bear out a pattern, fixing it belongs to the people within that group — that is accountability, and withholding the information does not protect anyone, it disarms them.
• “White” is redefined by statute to mean European descent only. Middle Eastern, Arab, and North African descent become their own separate categories. A category containing both a Norwegian and a Moroccan is not a category, it is an average of two unrelated populations.
• Immigration status at the time of offense is reported, and no agency may aggregate white with non-white in either direction or hide known categories inside an “other” bucket.
• Accuracy is measured per capita, as offenses per 100,000 against census population, so the reporting agency cannot control its own denominator. A 5% deviation from the jurisdiction's established rate is permitted.
• Deviation beyond the margin is a misdemeanor under strict liability; repetition is an automatic felony. The prior conviction supplies the notice the felony tier would otherwise lack. Conviction carries removal from office.
• State governors share the liability for the state-level submission, for any agency deviation after notice, and for anything they directed. A governor who can direct a result while only a subordinate hangs for it has not been deterred.

Elections

• A Central Political Pot funds every federal campaign equally. Anyone may contribute, including single filers and Super PACs, and contributing reduces the contributor's levy rate.
• No one may fund a candidate. Direct contributions to candidates, campaigns, parties and party committees are prohibited outright — a Phase 2 provision, since Buckley v. Valeo means no statute can ban them. Money may fund elections but cannot be aimed.
• Every private political donation forfeits all deductions and all buy-down access for ten years, forcing the full 10% levy. This covers Super PACs, direct candidate gifts, campaigns, parties, and any other vehicle. The breadth matters because of the phasing: the outright ban needs the amendment, so in Phase 1 the tax consequence has to reach every channel, or a donor simply writes the check to the candidate instead and pays nothing. This applies identically to married and single filers. A married household loses its marriage and per-child deductions; a single filer loses the Civic Buy-Down, which is his route to the floor. Neither can buy back down during the forfeiture period.
• Projected effect. The penalty is designed to exceed what a donation buys. Worked at the 5% transition floor:

  Filer	Normal	Forfeited	Per year	Over 10 yrs
  Married, 3 children ($55k gain)	5%	10%	$2,750	$27,500
  Married, no children ($42k gain)	5%	10%	$2,100	$21,000
  Single, bought down ($21k gain)	5%	10%	$1,050	$10,500
  Single, never bought down	10%	10%	$0	$0

  The last row is not a gap in the deterrent. A filer already paying the full 10% by choice has nothing to forfeit because he was never reducing his bill to begin with, and no penalty reaches a man who was not responding to the incentive in the first place. He also gains nothing: the Pot funds every qualified candidate identically, so a private donation buys no influence a public one would not. Paying more than your neighbors for a contribution that moves nothing is not a trade a rational man makes. For everyone else the arithmetic is straightforward — a household would have to value a private donation above five figures over the following decade, while the Pot accepts the same money at no cost at all. And once the amendment is ratified, giving directly to a candidate is not merely expensive but illegal.
• Failing to disclose a Super PAC donation is fraud, charged on the same footing as levy evasion and election fraud: 3–10× restitution, forfeiture, permanent disqualification from the buy-down, and prison for willful cases. Super PACs report contributions received and the two records are cross-matched, so concealment requires both parties to falsify in coordination.
• A Super PAC that falsifies its records is dissolved and its assets applied to debt principal, with no reconstitution under a new name. Its officers during the fraud are personally liable for tax evasion, not a campaign-finance violation — the falsified record is what lets a donor keep deductions he is not entitled to, which makes the organization a participant in his evasion.
• Super PACs themselves pay an entity tax of 10% on contributions received, collected at the point of receipt.
• Third-party candidacy becomes viable because every candidate clearing the viability threshold is funded identically. It ends politics as a contest over who can raise the most money from the wealthiest donors.

The ledger

Families reach the floor, not zero. Only 100% disabled veterans and true farmers reach 0%. Most households with families pay well under the cap.

Debt

Dedicated to principal	Annual
Levy floor earmark (0.5 pt)	$80–115B
Nickel Transactional Surcharge (5¢, debt-only)	$15B
Gold revaluation (one-time)	$1.055T

National debt: $40.1T. The Nickel Transactional Surcharge is a nickel added to every dollar-denominated transaction, roughly $48 per person annually, 100% dedicated to principal and never entering the general fund. It applies to every transaction settled in U.S. dollars, wherever it occurs, since a dollar-denominated contract anywhere draws on American monetary infrastructure and the stability behind the currency. It applies only while the nation carries debt, or during a national emergency threatening the continued existence of the Union — not a recession, a panic, a disaster, a pandemic, or a broad consensus that the moment is grave. Common consensus is not evidence. Emergency declarations require a named existential threat, independent audit certification, a five-year maximum, and are terminable by a 500-citizen jury on petition. It terminates automatically at zero debt. After retirement, surplus funds a citizens' dividend and a capped emergency reserve.

Phase 1 revenue	Annual
Levy (6.36% blended on $18.4T base, net of exemptions)	$1,143B
Protectionist tariffs	$550B
Less: retaliation buffer earmark (5% of tariffs)	–$28B
Social Security clawback	$275B
Consumption feedback $120B, contracting reform $100B, foreign aid $40B	$260B
H-1B annual fee $20B, remittance tax $20B, digital services $15B, golden visa $10B, land and mineral leasing $7B	$72B
Immigration enforcement	–$94B
Total general fund	$2,178B

Spending floor	Annual
Transition era (Social Security residual active)	$3,404B
Post-Social-Security	$2,644B
Gap, transition	–$1,226B
Gap, post-Social-Security	–$466B

Post-SS gap closes	Year
At 3% real growth (37% base growth)	11
At 5% real growth	6–7
At 7% real growth	5

Debt retired	Year
At 3% real growth	40
At 5% real growth	29
At 7% real growth	23

Alternatively the post-SS gap closes with no growth assumption at all, by raising the blended effective rate from 6.36% to 8.74% — still inside the 10% ceiling — which means narrowing the family deductions. Both routes are available.